Tax preparer led clients down road to deportation

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Ramon Rodriguez promised his clients, immigrants from Mexico who spoke little English, that he would win them legal residence if they paid him a few thousand dollars and let him handle the paperwork. All that most of them got was deportation orders.

A state appeals court upheld the former Santa Rosa tax preparer’s grand theft convictions and four-year prison sentence last week. The court also ordered Rodriguez to repay $22,000 to his former clients, who may have a hard time collecting if they’re deported.

Rodriguez himself has been sent to Mexico, having agreed to accept deportation about two years into his sentence, according to his lawyer, Michael Willemsen. He was a legal U.S. resident but a non-citizen and would have faced deportation after his release.

“He was trying to both build a business and help people,” Willemsen said. “This was a man who was over his head” but never expected his clients to be deported.

Prosecutors and the court had a harsher view.

“He built a cottage industry on the backs of hard-working individuals who were very low-skilled in English-speaking abilities,” said Deputy Attorney General Donna Provenzano. “He has ruined, for some if not all of these folks, the chance that they could become legal citizens anytime soon.”

The First District Court of Appeal said Rodriguez “made reckless promises to the victims that they could obtain legal residency.”

The court said Rodriguez started offering immigration services to clients of his tax business in 1998. He got a handbook from a lawyer that said illegal immigrants who apply unsuccessfully for political asylum can then file papers seeking to avoid deportation and gain legal residency. To qualify, they must have been in the United States for at least 10 years, have good moral character and show that deportation would cause extreme hardship to themselves or a dependent child.

Those were the filings Rodriguez made for his clients, some of whom heard his ads on Spanish-language radio. But as immigration lawyers testified at his trial, the applications were likely to fail, and would leave the clients facing deportation.

That’s because extreme hardship is very hard to prove. One lawyer who represented some of Rodriguez’s clients said she told him in 2002 that he didn’t know what he was doing. But the court said he told clients he was an expert, had them sign forms they didn’t understand and assured them they would win.

In fact, the court said, four of his clients won legal residency and testified on his behalf. But 10 others testified against him, including a woman who had been on the verge of winning legal status through her father before signing up with Rodriguez and winding up in deportation proceedings.

The appeals court overturned two of his 10 convictions because prosecutors had waited too long to file the charges, but upheld the rest. Rodriguez “acted with criminal intent,” the justices said, never examined the laws he claimed to understand, and “placed each of the victims on a path that led, with a high degree of certainty, to an order of deportation.”